In Milton Lumky Territory

Reading this book was... regrettable. Imagine a story centred around the wheelings and dealings of a sales rep for a discount warehouse who loves nothing more than banging on about the intricacies of dealing with specific suppliers and providing inane details about long and boring drives through long and boring country.

In Milton Lumky Territory is a novel by Philip K. Dick which was originally rejected by publishers, and only published after his death. Probably should have remained unpublished. In hindsight, it's plain to see why the amount of demand for the story of Skip Stevens was beyond low.

Basically, Skip is some non-descript kind of guy who drives around Idaho (and other boring places) buying and selling some kind of unimportant junk. It doesn't get much better than that, and I don't mean to blow my own horn, but that's probably the best summation of the plot you'll ever read.

He meets a woman (his old teacher, in fact, but that's not all that important because Dick doesn't really do all that much with it) and they get together and run her horrible typewriter business together as she goes on and on about raising her daughter but doesn't actually seem to do much in the way of raising her (or perhaps the author just doesn't care about kids). The climax of the book involves Skip's purchase of a few boxes of typewriters and then trying to off-load them on some unsuspecting rubes. Yikes.

The ending of the book is particularly bewildering as Dick paints Skip as being some kind of unemotional ruffian the whole way through, and for no good reason whatsoever, he changes his stripes and everyone lives happily ever after. Apart from the kid who is barely mentioned in the aftermath. Blah.

Oh yeah, Milton Lumky is some guy who's sick with a mystery illness and just sort of shows up for no reason throughout the book and doesn't have any real bearing on the story. His role in the plot could have been ably filled by a sign.

This book is so forgettable that I have already forgotten what I just wrote about, and hopefully you and I both will forget that this book (and review) ever existed.